PS - please remember to vote fairly. Please don't ask your friends to vote for you as this can easily skew the result. Thanks, Gordon

Hi everyone! Welcome to September's Assignment!

The theme for this month is "Unnatural", as suggested by Synchestra who won the June 2010 competition. Be sure to read the whole post for the rules.

In Synchestra's own words:

"After a little bit of thought, the theme for this month's assignment is un-natural. You can interpret that any way you like - I can think of at least two ways you could approach the assignment, and I'm sure there are more. I'd really like to see people push the boundaries on this one! But keep it clean and family-friendly - ED.

If you feel like a series would express your idea better than a single photo, feel free to enter up to three shots, arranged however you like, but they have to be obviously connected.

Last thing: please keep the PP to a minimum; levels, contrast, sharpening etc are all OK but keep that Warp tool where it belongs."

The rules!

1: This month you can submit one, two or three images in one post, but they have to be related and MUST be taken during September 2010. Photos taken earlier will be disqualified!

2: All images submitted must be no more than 500 pixels on their longest side, although you can include a link to a full resolution version if you like. Flickr users must link back to the original version to comply with its latest rules.

As always, please exercise good judgement on what is suitable for the forum. Keep it clean and family-friendly or it'll be removed. See the Forum Rules for guides.

Please include a sentence or two with your photo describing what you were trying to achieve and if there were any particular challenges in doing so like, for example, any special exposure or lighting setup.

We're all enthusiasts here, so it's also great to see what equipment you used and the settings too. So please also include the following:

Positive-Negative? A conundrumTopography has always fascinated me, I think that it all started when learning to dress myself and being amazed by the concept of 'inside out'. This image is intended to challenge the viewer to try and resolve whether it is positive or negative, rightside or inside out.

Everything you see here is actually the underside of a surface seen through a transparent medium (glass). The effect is created in a piece of hand-crafted Polish glassware by the way that the craftsman has flawlessly welded the stem onto the bowl. I don't know whether it fits the brief but it does require a certain inside-out way of looking at it to work out what is going on. I've been wanting to take this shot for ages, so thought this a perfect excuse!!

Zen gardens are made from natural objects relatively positioned each to the other according to very precise rules.
That makes for a very odd contradiction of Natural v. Contrived which I hope fits the bill?

Hmm...the theme is "Unnatural" -- with special instructions to interpret however we'd like and push the boundaries -- at the same time that I decide to practice my architecture photography and explore processing software? I guess this is as good a month as any for my first submission.

Reflection of the Trinity Church in the Hancock Tower, Copley Square, Boston (click for link to a larger version):

Camera Model: Canon EOS 1000D
Lens and focal length: 18-55mm kit lens at 18mm
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/200s
Sensitivity: ISO 200
Post processing: (using GIMP)
1. Duplicate the layer
2. Invert the colors on the top layer
3. Gaussian blur a little on the top layer, then set layer mode to dodge
4. Merge the layers, then duplicate the resulting layer some number of times with layer mode set to multiply. (I don't remember how many times I had to duplicate the layer for this particular image. Also, some layer modes should be set to burn instead of multiply. It varies by image, and I've used this effect on a few dozen photos.)